


and she says: your first sin was a lie you told yourself

by hitlikehammers



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: And She's Not Going to Tolerate Steve Being Too Bullheaded to Live his Own, Everyone Knows Steve and Bucky are In Love With One Another Except for the Idiots Themselves, F/M, Gen, Happy Ending, M/M, Nor Will She Tolerate Steve Being Blind to the Fact that the Man He Loves Loves Him Right Back, Old Peggy Carter, Other, POV Outsider, Peggy Carter has Lived a Life, Peggy POV, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-09
Updated: 2014-10-09
Packaged: 2018-02-20 11:03:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2426420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After nearly a century of this life, Peggy Carter understands the preciousness of time. Quite keenly, in fact.</p><p>So she's particularly determined to make certain that Steve Rogers stops <i>wasting</i> it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and she says: your first sin was a lie you told yourself

**Author's Note:**

> This is all the fault of iTunes, which played [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sPq-04T7Ek) on shuffle, spurring the title and then the fic at large.
> 
> All of the thanks to [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad) for looking this over and being encouraging beyond what I generally warrant with my incessant blabbering <3
> 
>  
> 
> And to those of you who subscribe to my stuff: I apologize if EVERYTHING I post gets listed as backdated at present—it's not old fic, I promise. It's just that Ao3 has taken to listing everything I post as either three days in the future or a month in the past, and it's an ongoing process of figuring out WHY that is.

She’s not the biggest fan of the news, these days.

In fact, she’s never once turned on the television mounted in her room. Occasionally, she’ll have to pass the common areas of the building, where a prim-faced anchor is spewing half-truths to the public, but for the most part, Peggy avoids such things. For one, it’s frustrating to hear about the degradation of modern society when she is—she knows—beyond doing anything constructive to set it to right. But more than that, Peggy’s found that there are only so many shocks to one’s system that one can take before it all becomes irrelevant, before the steel in one’s spine turns straight to apathy.

When they thawed the good Captain.

When the aliens took Manhattan.

When the Mandarin struck.

Peggy knew that Steve was alive for the better part of a year before he visited. She doesn’t think she blames him, really. But the fact remains.

Peggy’s not really the biggest fan of the news.

So it’s pure chance that she catches the report, and the glimpse of something significant beneath all the meandering noise: the glimpse of a face between one Tony Stark and one Captain Rogers at a press conference—half-shrouded, in the shadows, but there’s something about the jaw line, about the stretch of shoulders; about the eyes even hooded, even far away.

There’s something about the glint at the wrist of the man that sneaks through, that catches: that would register as a trick of the light to anyone else, anyone less sharp.

Anyone who wasn’t looking.

“Oh,” Peggy whispers, and the nurse wheeling her chair stops abruptly, leans in next to her and asks if she’s alright, takes her pulse with no trace of subtlety, and Peggy knows the girl will be concerned for the way Peggy’s heart’s pumping heavy, the way her breath catches, the way her eyes are undoubtedly glazed—because Peggy’s an old woman. Peggy’s lived a _life_.

But the impossible is a relative measure, she knows; and that face.

She couldn’t forget that face if she tried.

______________________________

Steve comes to see her a week later.

At least, she thinks it’s a week later. Her memory, these days: it’s not what it once was.

Steve’s often sad, these days, and today is no exception, yet Peggy cannot understand the logic. Not that emotions are logical, of course, or even often kind, but she remembers when the glimmer left Steve’s eyes, remembers rubble and degradation and the red around his eyes and the empty bottle of god-knows-what in his hands as he mourned a loss he couldn’t bear, as he confessed without words the dark places in his heart that Peggy thought she’d caught small glimpses of, but wasn’t sure, could never be _sure_ —

She remembers when Steve Rogers became sad, and she remembers why: of all the things her mind clings to, of all the things she keeps, that knowledge doesn’t waver.

“Oh Steve,” she murmurs, and her cheeks nearly ache for the way she smiles at him, full and broad and so _happy_ because Steve is a marvel, but this, _this_ —for all the trappings of horror and evil and pain—this is a miracle.

She clasps his hands: too big for hers, really, but even with how her bones no longer hold steady, she’s more sure in her grasp than Steve, who’s shaking just below the surface, who’s trembling from the inside out where she catches the flutter of his pulse against her fingers where hers wrap about him, where they try to suss out the reason Steve’s eyes are wide, the reason Steve’s breathing is shallow.

But she can’t. She can’t, because the world has changed, Steve has changed, and she doesn’t know the signs in him.

If ever she knew those signs.

“I’m so happy for you,” she whispers, hoping that she can ease some of this strange unease, but when she looks at him, he’s drawn, he’s pulled far and tight to breaking, looks as if he might sob then and there if he lets his jaw unclench against where he bites his lower lip to the point of tearing skin, drawing blood. 

“Steve,” she strikes her thumb against the skin of his hand, tries to soothe this unnamed barrier to the wonder she imagines feeling if somehow, despite hate and war and ruin and death, her husband were back in her arms again: the utter and complete warmth in her veins at just the mention, just the idea, let alone the _reality_ , here and _now_.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she asks, but it’s less rhetorical than it should be. “Doesn’t it,” she whispers, untangling her hand from Steve’s and reaching out a shivering palm to the center of Steve’s chest.

“Doesn’t it make this feel right again?” she asks.

She doesn’t expect the way his lungs seize under her touch, doesn’t expect the sound of utter despair that escapes him when he seeks her hand again with his own, leans down and keeps them clasped between his chest and her side as he bows his head against the bed and she reaches, lets her free hand stroke his hair as his back heaves, but he makes no more sound.

She doesn’t understand it, but she keeps him there, keeps her hand in those sandy locks until sleep takes her.

______________________________

When she remembers that night, those moments: when they next enter her mind, she’s wide awake. She doesn’t know how much time has passed; doesn’t know if Steve was still there when she woke.

Age, she thinks. Terrible for one’s memory.

______________________________

They live in Virginia, after. They’re married in the same church where his parents said _I Do_ , and she loves that in a way she’d never expected. She finds herself _being_ in ways she never expected.

 _It was war,_ he says, one night, wrapped around her, sweat drying between them where they stretch across their bed. He won’t look her in the eye; his hands on her hips feel strange, somehow: _there was a man._

She swallows, and she nods, and she breathes.

 _There was a man,_ Peggy nods, concurs, because of course: _it was war._

She means Steve, she means Howard; she means a photo in a compass and her first taste of fondue—she means any number of the men, good and bad, honest and sly, whom she glanced at once, twice, a thousand times, who she thought _perhaps_ about in the midst of death and dying, because it was war, and Peggy Carter’s not naive.

After all, if she had been, she’d have simply stayed at home.

 _Rogers liberated the base,_ Richard whispers, _But Barnes..._

And they’ve been married four years, now; they’ve talked about children; they’re in the bed where they make love, and yet this is not a conversation they’ve ever had before. 

_Pegs,_ Richard breathes against the line of her hair, and it teases at the soft strands that go every which way, untamed: wild in a way she’s not allowed herself to be for anyone else, with anyone else. 

_They were gonna take me,_ he says, and it’s pained, and Peggy’s breath catches against her will, beyond her control under his hands where they clasp around her middle, holding her lightly, but close as she thinks about Richard with the dead eyes, Richard with the taut skin, Richard on the table she’d read about in the reports—her _Richard_ : _Man was a goddamned hero._

And Peggy simply folds her hands around her husband’s, and holds him right back until the way he exhales loosens, until the horrors fade behind his eyes just a little, just enough.

Peggy folds her hands around Richard’s, and ignores the horrors she sees always; the ones that never fade.

 _Used to talk about a sweetheart,_ Richard speaks against the shell of her ear, far away: in a foxhole, in a cell, somewhere close to hell itself. _Little blonde spitfire who never knew how crazy he was about her._

And they’re silent, for a moment. They’re both silent, and neither of them breathe, and it kills Peggy, it sparks rage in her that it’s Richard who breaks it: who has the courage, here and now, between them both.

 _’Cept he never said it was a her,_ Richard muses, less a question and more a truth they’ve both pondered more than is reasonable; but less, still, than either of those souls deserved; _when I think back on it._

And of course, Peggy had wondered. Of course, when she saw Steve’s eyes on her lips, when she’d touched his body in those first moments after the serum—when she’d risked everything for him, and he’d smiled at her as he emerged from the jaws of death: when her heart trembled, seared, _raged_ as she shot at that blasted shield; the way she blossomed, the way she felt light to see her face with him in those films, hidden: tucked safe and secret and close.

Because it was war, and battle waits for no budding fancies: and he watched her, yes, and loved her, quite probably, but it was another heart he stepped into the darkness for, another life he risked his own to save, and for every look he gave her, there were others—less given than _shared_ , because for the all ships that sailed in those years, in that time, the ship shared between herself and Steve hadn’t sailed at all, really—had barely pulled anchor, had never left port. It was pure potential, and it was riveting, scintillating: but beyond glances and fantasies and a few brushes of lips—enough, for the time, she knows, and yet she’d always wanted more, dreamed of a friend and an equal and a colleague and a lover beside her, in the end—but beyond those short moments, those fleeting times between, there had been something tangible, something solid and real and filled with gravity and weight in the intervening space.

There was always another who followed him; who he followed in the night.

It was war, though. Of course. It was war, and there is a nature to that beast, so she’d always shelved assumptions and allowed herself indulgences, stolen seconds where the world was brighter, where it wasn’t a question of whether any of them would wake to meet the day to come. 

She’d wondered, but if she’s honest, she thinks she’d known, really. Known when Steve returned with the 107th worse for wear but mostly intact: she’d known from that first moment, that rousing cheer, the look in the eyes that watched Steve Rogers. 

She’d known, if she’s honest, long before Howard caught a glimpse of them: Steve the better off of the two and protesting, but somehow still conceding the soft gaze, the gentle touch of his childhood friend, his brother, the very _heart_ of him that Steve had feared lost as Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes runs shaky fingers across his face, up and down his arms, checking and checking again that Steve was real, was whole, was safe—Peggy had known, before she and Stark had intruded on that moment from a distance, before Howard had whistled low and muttered soft about never quite having had the misfortune to see two people so god-awfully in love, before.

The _misfortune_.

Apt, that.

 _When I asked if he’d ever gone dancing,_ Peggy turns, mouths against her husband’s throat, and she doesn’t know why they’re saying these things, doesn’t know why it’s important: she just knows that it is, that they must. _Steve used to say he was waiting for the right partner._

There are lips that press light, but linger long on the crown of her head, and it shifts a fault line in her chest, and she moves closer, burrows deeper into the body wrapped around her: so dear to all that she is.

 _Barnes,_ she shakes her head, squints her eyes against the sudden sting; _I should have noticed he couldn’t get drunk, Richard. I should have noticed that whatever they did to him…_

He cups her cheek, strokes the skin there, and Peggy thinks about the misfortune of being very much in love.

 _Barnes was a wreck,_ , Peggy says when she can form words again, when Richard’s touch soothes the tightness in her chest, in her throat. _He was rambling about the strangest things, no sense to it,_ and she remembers, seeing those eyes: unfocused, aimed elsewhere; she remembers thinking how she could never let Steve see this, how she knew even then that it would break his heart.

 _He talked about teaching that skinny moron to dance,_ Peggy exhales, and her eyes flutter closed as Richard’s lips meet the crook of her neck. _About his toes barely feeling the tramping for how small his student was, how light..._

Peggy struggles to breathe around something strong and vicious that swells through her, because it’s so clear, it’s so obvious where it’s always been obvious, and Peggy thought she was beyond delusions—doesn’t know why she never said it, never underscored it in the ledger of her mind: she’s not the sort to avoid truths, particularly ones that almost make her smile before she thinks about the tragedy of it, before she thinks about the loss. 

Little blonde spitfire who never knew...

 _Steve told me he didn’t dance,_ Peggy whispers, and she’s not ashamed that she makes herself small inside Richard's embrace, lets him hold her and cover her and make the world seem far away.

 _I don’t think he was waiting to find the right partner,_ she tells Richard’s chest before she’s pressing against him, insistent and needing and wanting because they both know what she means, they both know the words she doesn’t say to finish: that both know that Steve Rogers had already found his partner, and was only hoping to get him back.

Or else, perhaps, only hoping to lose himself before he had to square with the fact that, even _with_ him, he couldn’t, they _couldn’t_ —

Peggy meets Richard’s mouth, Richard’s hips, and celebrates a misfortune of loving; laments, revels in the fact that she can, where others couldn’t.

Where others were robbed the chance—she will live it.

For _them_.

______________________________

It hits her, wave-like and unrepentant as she wakes to Steve at her side, near by far, still; with the television that she never turns on tuned in to an interview, muted with just images, just people: reporters that look somewhat familiar, maybe, though most reporters have that look about them—but then there’s the face, a photo that flashes, and the jaw, those eyes framed by longer hair, and yet—

She squints to make out the ticker at the bottom of the screen—her eyes are the only thing that haven’t failed her entirely, not yet: _Hero or Terrorist? Patriot or Comrade? Victim or Murderer? Prisoner or Monster? Threat or Avenger?_

The words, they crawl by—endless—and it all suddenly makes perfect, horrible sense: the hurting, the mourning, the feeling, the glances, the way they looked and never touched, the way they were near by never close; the way Steve’s been here too often, not merely confused, but running from the inevitable, from the pull beneath his ribs, from the tearing in his heart for the way it has to _ache_.

“Good _god_.” 

And air in her lungs is a precious thing, these days—a heavy thing, rattling and faint and she wonders, sometimes, when a breath grows thick, if the Steven Grant Rogers she never got to know felt like this, just like this, so many years ago; but the air in her lungs is a precious thing, but it feels almost superfluous as her eyes widen, as the pieces fall into place: impossible; absolutely _certain_.

The _idiots_.

“I always thought you were trying to hide from the world, from prying eyes that wouldn’t,” her voice cracks, traitorous thing—Steve reaches over, concern dripping from his gaze as he guides the straw in her water to her lips; she drinks, but not for long, and shakes her head when he lingers close as she rasps out, catches her breath around the words: “that wouldn’t have understood.” 

And when her eyes clear, when she blinks one, two more times so as to see his face: Steve’s staring at her in a way she’s never seen, and she wonders if he’s forgetting—she forgets so much, these days, forgets so easily: but she blinks again, narrows her eyes and it doesn’t take long for even her aging synapses to place what she doesn’t know: fear.

He’s petrified. He’s pale.

He sets the water down, because it shakes within his grasp.

Her lips curl, but it’s more in pain, really: more with pity than anything softer, anything lighter as she breathes out, slow:

“I never dreamed you were foolish enough to have been hiding it from each _other_.”

And while memory rarely serves her, these days, Peggy is almost certain: this is the first and only time Steven Grant Rogers has left this room, left her side, before sleep takes her first. It’s a very telling thing.

She settles back into her pillow—too flat, now, for any real comfort—and sighs; shakes her head.

As if she needed any further proof as to the state of that poor man’s soul.

______________________________

Steve is sitting in the same chair as always, turned the same as always to look at Peggy’s photographs—what’s different are his eyes, this time. He doesn't see the pictures.

The skin beneath that vibrant blue is bruised—is red.

Peggy doesn’t always have her days straight, it’s true, but her mind is sharp, today—her body feels her own, stronger than her years deserve, and she _knows_ there have been too many days in a row where Steve’s been next to her, where Steve’s been quiet.

Been a stubborn mule about the _simplest_ of things, frankly. Men and their _emotions_ , good lord.

Specifically: Steve Rogers and his insistence upon such _dramatics_.

It’s time, she thinks, to put a firm end to such nonsense. It’s long past time.

And time, much as she can't keep track of it: time's a thing she knows she can't afford to waste.

“Why are you here, Steve?”

His shoulders tense before his eyes clear, and he turns to her, takes her in with a question in his gaze.

“Not that I don’t enjoy your company,” she tilts her head a little, smiles out the corner of her mouth: soft; sad. “But one does have to wonder at the motivation for a vibrant, heartsick young man languishing with an old woman at night, particularly—”

Her breath catches, chokes around a coughing fit she can’t control and Steve’s on his feet in and instant, getting her water glass and bringing the straw to her lips, and she drinks, gratefully, but as soon as her lungs fill steadily once more she’s frowning, waving off his concern until he’s seated once again, looking worried but chastened, and that’s good, that’s precisely right, because that’s the aim, really; that’s what she needs to do, and she can’t let a tickle in the throat set her off-course, because if there is _one thing_ that needs accomplished in this moment, here and now, no more waiting, it is setting Steve Rogers—the whole of him, heart and soul—to rights as best she can.

She clears her throat, and quirks her brow as best she can: she may not be what she was, she may not stand near as tall, when she can, in fact, stand, but she’s not entirely lost—not yet.

“ _Particularly_ ,” she says with every ounce of severity, every bit of the subtle, knowing censure she’d honed as a wife, a mother, an aunt: “when you _could_ be with the person you love.”

Steve blinks, swallows until his Adam’s apple looks like it just might bob away.

“I am with a person I love,” is what he says, and it’s hoarse but it’s earnest, it’s covering all the hollow places with real aplomb and oh, goodness: this beautiful _moron_.

Peggy can’t help herself but to snort, even if it stings all the way down behind her ribs.

“Don’t play coy, Rogers,” she rebukes, rolls her eyes and tosses her head, and she fights the urge to grin at the way she feels her hair flip with the motion—like it used to, sassy and stern and gorgeous, and she damn well _knew_ it—but she can’t, not now: this is a time for gravitas, for making a point.

Steve stares at her for a long stretch of moments, waiting for her to give, to let it go, and there’s a desperation at the edge of his eyes that almost convinces her she should, that to push any further would be cruel, but no: it feels nearly like it used to, like they’re equals, and perhaps they still are, where it matters—perhaps he’ll heed this, from her.

She prays that much is true.

He sighs, deep and long, and there’s something lost in him, something stripped of him that leaves him fragile in its wake.

“You’re my best girl, Peggy,” and it comes out a little shrill, a little frantic, like ice when it cracks under weight, and oh.

She cannot let this stand, but the fact that she might have to watch him shatter, first: it doesn’t make this easy.

But it will not stop her.

“Am I?” she asks, rhetorical, something like playfulness disguising the heart of the question, the steel at its core. “I suspect I was, once. And perhaps am, still,” she softens, a bit, lets herself give as her voice lowers, drops to a whisper as she reaches for him.

“You’ve lived so little, for all the weight you carry. It isn’t fair.” And his hand’s in hers before she can breathe: she runs unwieldy fingers over the peaks of his knuckles, and suddenly, it’s Peggy who is strong, who bears them both within these moments.

It’s a horrible, heady feeling.

“There were moments,” Peggy says, slow: lets herself keep her breath by speaking only in the valleys, in the spaces as she strokes up and down the line of Steve’s bones: “I would never deny either of us that fact.” She breathes in deep, forces herself to say the words she never thought she’d have to: “And _yet_.”

It’s as loaded, as weighted as it needs to be, as she means it, and his head snaps upward, eyes wide: unmoored, brimming with devastation and terror and all of the things he’d thought he’d buried—she understands now. There was a whole person in this man who she’d never fully seen, never fully known not only for the years before they met, but because there was a full, bleeding heart in him that she’s not even sure _he_ knows the depths of.

Her own chest is tight, at the thought; the sight. She wants to gather him close, wants to tell him to break here, where it's safe, where she can help: but no.

That’s not the help he needs.

“A woman knows, Steve,” she steels herself, steels them both with a thin smile, slips their fingers together and clasps his hand full: “Even when she’d rather not.” She dips her chin, and waits until he’s ready to acknowledge it, all those unspoken truths.

And Steve’s face, that _face_ : it crumbles, it falls in upon itself and seeks out ruin, but Peggy won’t have that, she _won’t_.

“Do not,” she snaps, hisses until he straightens, until he can hold himself in a single piece, if only just. “Do not sit there, and think that you’ve betrayed what never got to grow, that you misled where we never walked.” 

She sees the fight in him, the indignation, the remnants of the _need_ to hide the reality of his own heart in a way that’s no longer necessary, and it bites at her spine in the worst of ways, draws her up straighter, leaves her shifting to sit taller, batting Steve’s hands away as they try to help but catching them, ultimately, in between both her own.

“There was,” she says, soft, looking at their joined holds and not his eyes. “There _is_ love. Affection. There was possibility.”

She glances up, then, and the tears in her own eyes draw her smile out wobbly, she can feel it.

“But there was also _life_ , and pain, and opportunities that never came,” she tells him, solemn and sad but without regret. “And I married a man I was deeply in love with, I built a family with that man.” 

She lets one of her hands reach, slow so that it doesn’t shake as it goes to cup Steve’s face, to draw him in and run a cragged thumb beneath his eye, to press the tears that threaten back where they belong: unshed. Not yet.

“You and I, we never had the chance to fall in love,” she whispers, strokes along his cheekbone. “We never had the opportunity to try.”

And it’s true. Perhaps it’s sad, perhaps it’s best, perhaps it’s so many things that Peggy cannot stand behind and say for certain. Perhaps.

The only thing she knows is that it’s true, and that perhaps, _perhaps_ she is selfish enough to say she wouldn’t change it.

She wouldn’t risk losing what _was_ gained, what was won, in the end.

 _This_ end. If only they could _see_.

“But that doesn’t mean that either of us never knew it. Being in love.” She breathes, leans in, draws Steve down so that they’re eye to eye, so that she’s close enough to see those lashes, one by one was they shake against all feeling.

“You, I think, before me.”

The breath Steve draws in is tremulous, is deep in a way that feels profound: he doesn’t argue. He doesn’t object.

Peggy smiles. It’s a thin thing, but it is very real.

“I am not the kind to believe in a given plan in life,” Peggy drops her hands to her lap, and looks at them as she breathes, as she thinks through what she’s saying, what she’s kept close for so long before she reaches again, only takes Steve’s fingers and lays her own atop those long, artist’s tools. “If what you need is some kind of solace,” she murmurs, “something about how the ice that robbed you both was in service of some greater end, I cannot give you that.”

She stares, imagining hands that love, that touch like they love, like they need: hands she used to have. Hands she can remember, here and now.

Hands that Steve has; that Steve deserves to have in kind.

“But.” Her breath catches, and Steve moves to lean, to help, to fear where she doesn’t want it, can’t bear to see it anymore, no matter what it’s for: she shakes her head, and closes her eyes, and will herself just a little farther. Just a little longer.

She has to make him see.

“I told you, once, that you were meant for more,” Peggy says, and it comes out breathier, farther away than she’d like so she squints her eyes closed harder, focuses on the strain there and releases it in her own chest, against her own lungs—wills it away until it listens.

It listens. For that, she’s grateful.

“And while you saved us, saved so many, saved the _world_ ,”she says, pointed and steady and just as she means it: grateful, but not _enough_ : “I am not convinced that was all you were destined to do, all that you were meant to be.”

Steve’s looking up at her, now: shy through those lashes, and she wonders, idly, if that’s how he looked at James Barnes, once upon a time: the first day they met. The first day he realized...

“And perhaps it is coincidence,” Peggy rights herself, her mind, her trajectory. No time for idle thoughts: not now. “Perhaps it is simply the cruel irony of being that you’re here, Steve. That you’re alive to see the world as it is, now. To fight when the fighting is more fierce than we ever could have fathomed.”

And she winces, before she can stop herself: because to think of what they missed, what horrors they unknowingly fed; to think of what she may have had an unwitting hand in causing, facilitating, allowing to breed, to twist, to manipulate and bastardize and control and destroy—

She breathes in deep. She grips the sheets beneath her. _Oh Richard_ , she closes her eyes, and thinks about the way he would hold her on the worst days, when the job took its toll: when he knew when to ask and when to simply give, and she misses that.

She lets herself miss that, if only for a moment.

Then she lets it go.

“And perhaps it is coincidence,” Peggy says again, nods, because yes: perhaps. “Perhaps it is simply the cruel irony of being that you’re here, Steve, that you’re alive to see the world as it is, now. To fight when the fighting is more fierce than we ever could have fathomed. That you’re still breathing, when breathing’s little more than poor consolation for knowing what hell looks like, what it feels like, for being ravaged and ruined and unmade down to the fibres, the very threads.”

Her chest is heaving, and she thinks Steve’s hand is on her shoulder. Her chest is hurting, and thinks about Washington, thinks about the fall of all she’d hoped to build. Thinks about the snippets of reports she’d heard, whispers of a ghost they’d all denied but feared, of a fall that even Captain America couldn’t survive on his own, of metal arms and cryochambers they’d found abandoned in the 60s, the 80s, the 90s again, and what _if_ —

She thinks about how the hardest battles are often fought within.

“But then,” and it’s a tremble, it’s a shaky thing that she has to place a hand to her own heart to contain, to control, because this is the crux of it: this is the center. “Perhaps it is coincidence, and nothing more, than you’re in the place, in this time, where the deep things in that heart of yours, that unfathomable heart,” and once she’s steady, she takes the hand on her chest and places it to Steve’s as she breathes out: “where they aren’t dangerous like they used to be anymore.”

And that unfathomable heart that her hand’s pressed up against: it’s beating like a wild thing, all the deeper, all the fuller and harder for the way his lungs are straining, for the way he’s damn well gasping, and yes, Peggy thinks: _yes_ —this is where she’ll have to break him open in order to save him from himself.

“That you’re _both_ here,” she murmurs, leans in like it’s a secret when anyone with eyes could see it clear: “Where you’re both needed more than ever.”

She slides her hand from Steve’s chest, up his neck where she feels the pulse against her palm, to his jaw, to his cheek where he leans against her touch like he needs it, like it’s necessary, and the skin that she touches is glazed wet with all that he’s held back, so she says it, plain as day:

“Where you can love in all the ways you’d ever _dreamed_.”

The sound that forces its way past Steve’s lips is a ravaged thing, a horrid thing: all terror and agony, all death and loss and fear, but those things are too heavy, too leaden, she thinks, to have bore the keen from Steve’s throat—something stronger, something brighter and buoyant had to coax it out from its festering place and she wants, she _needs_ it to be the hope he’d never thought to hold.

She needs it to be the love that wants to be felt in the bones of him, _finally_ , without any thought to shame.

“And do not for a moment imagine that it is an equation that will ever break wholly even, that having this will erase what was done, what was _suffered_ ,” she whispers fiercely, because she knows that story, she knows that it ends in ways you never think to want: she knows that sometimes it is better, for the struggle, but _this_...

But Steve’s looking at her, hanging on every word, watching with bated breath: needing so clearly, heart shining in his eyes in a way she’s never seen but knows, _knows_ is still nothing compared to how those eyes will find the one they’ve been seeking out for near a century—open or closed, the heart in those eyes, that she sees, had _always_ belonged to one soul, one self, one man among millions: a sergeant with eyes just as steady, just as true.

“But ‘even’ is not what living is for,” she tells him, because she knows, she _sees_ in him their ending, and it is better. They are better. 

“And maybe what you can have will be enough to heal,” she leans back, frames his face, brings the heels of her palms together beneath his chin and weathers the way he trembles, watches the way he cries with all the compassion, all the softness and care she can hold. “Maybe that will be enough to outshine all that dark, more days than it doesn’t.”

“So even if it is coincidence, Steven,” she lets her thumb trace the corner of his lips, tender and gentle, speaking to that heart she sees in him as close, as true as she can when she says: “By _god_ , do not waste it.”

“Peggy,” Steve breathes out, heavy and broken but mending, maybe.

Maybe mending.

“Peggy, I, he—”

Steve’s voice breaks on a sob, and he hangs his head, but Peggy won’t have that, she _won’t_.

“Look at me,” she says, grabs for his hand as she leans against the bed, the fight going out of her, and fast, but she forces herself to stay focused, to see this through as best she can. 

He meets her gaze again, and she strokes his wrist, and she smiles, soft, and tired: she hopes that’s enough. 

“He knew, Steve,” she tells him, that single central fact that should have made all of this unnecessary: that should have been warm in the hollow of Steve’s chest all these years, fending off the chill. “He knew your worth from the start, before any of us got a chance. He seized his opportunity,” her jaw trembles around those words, the loss in them as well as the unthinkable gain, and she swallows, heavy and hard so that she can speak with conviction: “I cannot imagine anything, any evil, that could tarnish that fact.” 

Steve turns his hands around to clasp at her own, and he squeezes: firm, tight. Grounds himself. 

She musters all the energy she’s got left, and grips right back. 

“So seize yours, Steve. Your opportunity,” she says, begs him: commands—somewhere between all of what she is and all of what they’ve known and the _need_ , here, to know that somewhere, for someone, Steve Rogers will gaze with eyes that gleam with the whole heart of him: nothing held back or hurt too sheer to show. 

“Be a hero. Be a leader, an inspiration, a bullheaded idiot who can’t back down from a fight,” he chuckles, wetly, and so does she, even if it’s faint. “Be all of the things that were written in your bones long before I met you,” she speaks it, quick and breathless because she can feel exhaustion falling over her limbs, weighing her eyes, and she’ll not be able to fight it much longer, she knows. 

“But more than any of those things, be a man who lived a beautiful life,” Peggy says softly, but she thinks Steve can tell that she means this bit more than anything else: “Be a man who had the misfortune of loving beyond any _sense_ ,” and she thinks of stubble and Richard’s aftershave and the way she’d never laughed like that for anyone else—the way she hasn’t laughed like that since she lost him. “Of _being_ loved beyond whatever reason’s left in this world.” 

She manages to get a good grasp on his hands one more time, to squeeze lightly, but to squeeze nonetheless: 

“Be _that_ man, Steve.” 

And she’s too tired, just then, to fight as he eases her back to her pillow, and it’s alright, somehow. It is. 

She knows, as sleep starts to settle on her: she knows, somewhere deep and unnameable, that he’ll be that man. 

He will. 

______________________________ 

It’s late: dark. Even beyond her door, Peggy can tell things are quiet. 

She’d been asleep. She’s not a restless sleeper, so logically: something woke her. Something out of the ordinary caught her attention—startled the instincts honed too long, too sharp to be entirely dead, even now. 

She breathes, takes silent stock with her eyes still closed: there is a presence, she can feel it; there are subtle noises, soft footfalls, a rustle in the curtains. But she knows, somehow—heart steady, palms dry—that there is nothing to fear. 

She can feel that, too. 

The footsteps approach, and just as she knows that the very fact that she can hear them is wholly deliberate, she is careful to make the cadence of her own breaths obvious: she is awake. 

They communicate in that silence, as the presence comes closer. 

There’s a sharp intake of breath before a hand settles at the nape of her neck: gentle, cradling her with a tenderness she hasn’t known in so very long, and there’s a subtle scent to the air—another sign, another intentional communique that tells her this isn’t something to fear, because fear is traceless, fear comes in the night without a breath, without a sound, without the faint musk that reminds her of Richard, that makes her feel like she’s home. 

She exhales, and if the motion rolls her head into the warm touch, that’s fine. She’s not entirely sure it’s not a dream, anyway. 

There’s pressure, a touch that she only just registers at her fingertips, against her wrist, and it takes her a moment: and that’s the haze of sleep, the curse of age—it takes a moment for her to realize that she hadn’t fallen asleep with a pen she can barely hold, trying to train her hands back to steadiness as she sometimes does; she hadn’t been staring at the locket she kept in the left bedside drawer—a gift for their 25th anniversary that she finds in her hands upon waking more than she can explain, so much sentiment: it takes a moment for her to realize. 

It’s not a pen, or a locket. It’s a hand, in her hand: strong, and almost desperate, almost frightened in the way it folds around her own entirely, clasps firm but not tight. 

It’s a hand, in her hand: and that hand is made of metal. 

She understands, now: all the whispers and the wonderings and why it didn’t feel like a threat when this man, this sweet tortured soul entered her room in the dark. 

The breathing of the man stutters and she hears it, but only after she feels it: because there’s a body leaning, curled close near her: not touching, but she wishes it would because it’s cool in the room, and the body is warm, and she thinks that the man, this man, needs to feel at every opportunity he’s afforded: needs to know comfort wherever it lives. 

She feels the heat of an exhale against the crown of her head, the line of her hair, and she shivers—a gorgeous, breakable thing—when dry, full lips drop to her skin and hold, press there for the space of a great many heartbeats before they move, before he speaks: 

“ _Thank you_.” 

And it’s a trembling sound, it’s filled with so very much that she hasn’t earned and that he never deserved to suffer, but perhaps, too: so much he deserves to relish, and Peggy smiles, even as she feels hot droplets fall on sleep-tousled strands of hair, wet and born of the way the body gives under pressure—the way the soul shakes free in relief. 

Her fingers turn, move to tighten, to hold his in return: she’s not certain whether he’ll feel it, at first, but when she grasps he stills before folding in, before his weight rests on the bed, just barely touching and she leans into it, some kind of benediction from one to the other though she can’t for the life of her understand who gives it, who offers it, but it doesn’t matter. 

She’d give the rest of her days, and many more already gone, if James Buchanan Barnes could breathe in joy, now, after everything. She’d think it an honor, to receive a blessing, a thought of goodness from a man like Bucky. 

He’s curled around her, slight but present, and she smiles into the way she can feel the rise and fall of his chest, the way she catches the flutter of his heartbeat now and again, and he’s murmuring to her, the same words over and over: _Thank you, thank you, Jesus, thank you, I can’t, you don’t, I—_

_Thank you_. 

His lips press again to her brow, in gratitude, and she lets herself sink into it, lets herself imagine a locket pressed to the hollow of her throat, a hand in her own, a touch of lips well-loved and so very missed: she allows herself to keep that memory vibrant, here, alongside the present, alongside Bucky Barnes, alive and finally, _finally_ seeing with both eyes. 

Finally _seen_ without fear. 

And Peggy: she lets herself fall back to sleep, warmer than she’s been in many years, in many moons, and she knows he won’t be here when she wakes; knows she’s likely to forget this come morning. But that doesn’t matter, not truly. 

Because when he leaves, he’ll go to the man whose heart he’s always held, before he ever knew it, except now he’ll know it: he’ll see blue eyes that shine in ways that Peggy can only imagine, and he’ll hold Steven Rogers with this same tenderness, but tenfold—with a love she can only pull from her memories, now, and that’s as it should be. 

Peggy spares Bucky one last squeeze of her hand in his own, says all she needs to in that gesture, and she knows that the words she doesn’t say are heard, because the last thing she knows before sleep settles in her bones for the night is a teardrop that falls against the skin of her forehead, but this time: this time, the lips resting there stretch into something like a smile. 

So Peggy smiles back, and sleeps. 

Her work here is done. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com) :)


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